As soon as we were in the carriage I spoke, with a strained effort at ease and the haphazard tone which should mask furtive cross-examination.
"Professor Black is an interesting man," I said.
"Do you think so?" she answered from her dark corner.
"Surely. His intellect is really alive. Yet, with all his scientific knowledge and his power of eliciting facts and elucidating them, he is but a feather headed man." I paused, but she made no answer. "Do you not think so?"
"How can I tell?" she replied. "We only talked about fishing. He managed to make that topic a pleasant one."
Her tone was frank. I felt relieved.
"He is exceedingly clever," I said, heartily, and we relapsed into silence.
When we reached home, and Margot had removed her cloak, she came up to me and laid her hand on my arm.
So unaccustomed was her touch now that I was startled. She was looking at me with a curious, steady smile--an unwavering smile that chilled instead of warming me.
"Ronald," she said, "there has been a breach between us. I have been the cause of it. I should like to--to heal it. Do you still love me as you did?"
I did not answer immediately; I could not. Her voice, schooled as it was, seemed somehow at issue with the words she uttered. There was a desperate, hard note in it that accorded with that enigmatic smile of the mouth.
It roused a cold suspicion within me that I was close to a masked battery. I shrank physically from the touch of her hand.
She waited with her eyes upon me. Our faces were lit tremblingly by the flames of the two candles we held.
At last I found a voice.
"Can you doubt it?" I asked.
She drew a step nearer.
"Then let us resume our old relations," she said.
"Our old relations?"
"Yes."
I shuddered as if a phantom stole by me. I was seized with horror.
"To-night? It is not possible!"
"Why?" she said, still with that steady smile of the mouth.
"Because--because I don"t know--I---- To-morrow it shall be as of old, Margot--to-morrow. I promise you."
"Very well. Kiss me, dear."
I forced myself to touch her lips with mine.
Which mouth was the colder?
Then, with that soft, stealthy step of hers, she vanished towards her room. I heard the door close gently.
I listened. The key was not turned in the lock.
This sudden abandonment by Margot of the fantastic precautions I had almost become accustomed to filled me with a nameless dread.
That night I fastened my door for the first time.
IV.
_Friday Night, November 6th_.
I fastened my door, and when I went to bed lay awake for hours listening. A horror was upon me then which has not left me since for a moment, which may never leave me. I shivered with cold that night, the cold born of sheer physical terror. I knew that I was shut up in the house with a soul bent on unreasoning vengeance, the soul of the animal which I had killed prisoned in the body of the woman I had married. I was sick with fear then. I am sick with fear now.
To-night I am so tired. My eyes are heavy and my head aches. No wonder.
I have not slept for three nights. I have not dared to sleep.
This strange revolution in my wife"s conduct, this pa.s.sionless change--for I felt instinctively that warm humanity had nothing to do with the transformation--took place three nights ago. These three last days Mar-got has been playing a part. With what object?
When I sat down to this gray record of two souls--at once dreary and fantastic as it would seem, perhaps, to many--I desired to rea.s.sure myself, to write myself into sweet reason, into peace.
I have tried to accomplish the impossible. I feel that the wildest theory may be the truest, after all--that on the borderland of what seems madness, actuality paces.
Every remembrance of my mind confirms the truth first suggested to me by Professor Black.
I know Margot"s object now.
The soul of the creature that I tortured, that I killed, has pa.s.sed into the body of the woman whom I love; and that soul, which once slept in its new cage, is awake now, watching, plotting perhaps. Unconsciously to itself, it recognises me. It stares out upon me with eyes in which the dull terror deepens to hate; but it does not understand why it fears--why, in its fear, it hates. Intuition has taken the place of memory. The Change of environment has killed recollection, and has left instinct in its place.
Why did I ever sit down to write? The recalling of facts has set the seal upon my despair.
Instinct only woke in Margot when I brought her to the place the soul had known in the years when it looked out upon the world from the body of an animal.
That first day on the terrace instinct stirred in its sleep, opened its eyes, gazed forth upon me wonderingly, inquiringly.
Margot"s faint remembrance of the terrace walk, of the flower-pots, of the gra.s.s borders where the cat had often stretched itself in the sun, her eagerness to see the chamber of death, her stealthy visits to that chamber, her growing uneasiness, deepening to acute apprehension, and finally to a deadly malignity--all lead me irresistibly to one conclusion.
The animal"s soul within her no longer merely shrinks away in fear of me. It has grown sinister. It lies in ambush, full of a cold, a stealthy intention.
That curious, abrupt change in Margot"s demeanour from avoidance to invitation marked the subtle, inward development of feeling, the silent pa.s.sage from sensation only towards action.
Formerly she feared me. Now I must fear her.
The soul, Crouching in its cage, shows its teeth. It is compa.s.sing my destruction.